The Brothers Karamazov

The Brothers Karamazov (, Brat'ya Karamazovy, ), also translated as The Karamazov Brothers, is the last novel by Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Dostoevsky died less than four months after its publication. It has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature. Set in 19th-century Russia, The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel that discusses questions of God, free will, and morality. It has also been described as a theological drama dealing with problems of faith, doubt, and reason in the context of a modernizing Russia, with a plot that revolves around the subject of patricide. Dostoevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, which inspired the main setting. Background Although Dostoevsky began his first notes for The Brothers Karamazov in April 1878, the novel incorporated elements and themes from an earlier unfinished project he had begun in 1869 entitled The Life of a Great Sinner. Another unfinished project, Drama in Tobolsk (Драма. В Тобольске), is considered to be the first draft of the first chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. Dated 13 September 1874, it tells of a fictional murder in Staraya Russa committed by a praporshchik named Dmitry Ilynskov (based on a real soldier from Omsk), who is thought to have murdered his father. It goes on to note that the father's body was suddenly discovered in a pit under a house. The similarly unfinished Sorokoviny (Сороковины), dated 1 August 1875, is reflected in book IX, chapter 3–5 and book XI, chapter nine.